A Naif in the Forest by Darrell Berger

Wing Tips to Hiking Boots: Musings of a New, Full-Time Poconos Resident

“The wolfsbane should be coming up soon,” my wife said. 

“You planted wolfsbane? That is so cool!” I replied. I was fascinated by vampires, zombies and werewolves as a boy. Wolfsbane is well known to werewolf aficionados as a useful deterrent. 

Then I discovered that wolfsbane, also called monkshood because the flower looks like one, is deadly poisonous and has been used for centuries to kill real wolves. Should we be growing it with Violet the Corgi sniffing about? 

Kathleen thought it unlikely that her seed supplier was selling deadly poisonous plants. We found she had planted winter wolfsbane, or winter aconite, a relative to the real thing, but not harmful. Or was it? 

Websites, from seed catalogues to academic journals, differed. Some say it is not harmful or don’t address the issue. Others say that the whole plant is toxic, especially the bulb. 

At the advice of my veterinarian, I checked the ASPA website list of toxic plants. No winter’s wolfsbane, but no real wolfsbane, either. If they left out an obviously toxic plant, then perhaps the omission of the winter kind was not proof of its innocence. 

I again perused the list of plants poisonous to dogs. Chamomile, chives, daffodils, lemon grass and onions were included, along with many other common plants, as well as several we encounter in the forest, like milkweed. The whole forest is toxic! 

Apparently winter wolfsbane is poisonous, but not very, similar to daffodils. No case has ever been reported of a dog getting sick from it. It might be poisonous if you made winter wolvesbane tea and served it to someone every morning, not that I’m suggesting this. A dog digging or munching at it would be in little danger. 

We are now free to enjoy the little flowers, which appear even before crocus. Since I have seen no werewolves in our part of the forest, the wolfsbane must be doing its job. Nor has Violet developed a bark that says, “Danger, werewolf approaching!” I wonder what that bark would be like?